Jordan Brock

File under “Things for me to remember when reinstalling stuff”

For me, one of the best things about using Ruby/Rails/Sinatra for web development is HAML/SASS, which allow me to quickly write and maintain HTML/CSS without having to worry about all the pointless stuff, like brackets etc. A by-product of using HAML/SASS is that when you have to write in something else, it causes me grief. JavaScript is a case in point.

Coffeescript (and to a lesser extent) bistro_car solve this. It brings the beauty of a ruby-like language to writing JavaScript, so that once again you don’t have to worry about all the crap that goes along with it.

However, I ran into a slight problem when following Dr Nic’s setup tutorial today. CoffeeScript worked, bistro_car worked within the console, but it didn’t work when accessing the page through the browser. But some path re-working, and a kind word or two from @sutto, and we’re good to go.

For future reference, here’s what I did. I’m using the homebrew package manager. Mainly because it’s awesome, and I use MacOS X, which is also awesome.

So, I installed node.js, coffeescript and bistro_car like so:

brew install node
brew install coffee-script
gem install bistro_car

Then, add the following to your environment.rb file:

config.gem 'bistro_car'

Create an ‘app/scripts’ directory in your Rails app, which is where you can store all your .coffee files (application.coffee etc).

You then get bistro_car to include those script files by putting this in your layout/template/page/whatever:

coffee_script_bundle

Then, you load the page, and bistro_car automagically uses coffee-script to convert your .coffee files to javascript. Except, of course, when it doesn’t work because something is screwed somewhere.

As with almost every problem on a *nix computer, the problem is a path one, and thankfully solved with some simple symlinks. It seems passenger operates in it’s own little world when it comes to paths, and it just didn’t want to play nice with my environment. So, I tricked it as follows:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/coffee /usr/bin/coffee
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node

And that, my friend, is how you skin the unix path cat.